Beauvallet

De: Georgette Heyer

Narrado por: Matt Addis

Brought to you by Penguin.

Witty, elegant, stylish and the best comedies of manners since Jane Austen.

'Mad Nicholas' to his friends, 'Scourge of Spain' to the enemy, Sir Nicholas Beauvallet has never been known to resist a challenge. When a captured galleon yields the lovely Doña Dominica de Rada y Sylva, he vows to return her and her father to the shores of Spain. But he has no sooner said than done, so he proposes a venture more reckless than any of his exploits on the high seas which have made him Drake's equal and a favourite of the queen. He will take Dominica as his bride even if he must enter the lion's den....

©1929 Georgette Heyer (P)2021 Penguin Audio

Before the Regency Romances

In later years Georgette would feel more at home at Regency squeezes and leave swashbuckling to Rafael Sabatini, but it’s fun hearing her pay him tribute. Since structure and pace were yet to be perfected the story takes some time to take off yet it’s worth the wait. The narrator’s voice has the ring of steel!

fun adventure

some of this is kind of hard to understand because of the heavy language. but it's a fun adventure mixed with romance and a spunky heroine and dashing hero.

Amazing narrator, flirty male lead!

This is the first time (chronologically) we see such an aggressively flirty male lead from Heyer! He's written very well, and hearing the narrator (who is so good at different voices that I kept forgetting Nick and Joshua were voiced by the same man) say his lines had me kicking my feet and giggling! For modern sensibilities, there are a few scenes where I was like "oooh thats not cool," where the male lead suddenly kisses her though she's refusing him, but it's made very clear soon after by a conversation with her maid that she's super into it (and even Nick later tells his servant "yeah she loves this suave act I'm doing lol"), so I can more easily throw my feminism out the window for this story. It was exciting too! Yet again, Heyer's stories had me going "OH MY GOD WHAT" every time the plot jumped ahead, and I was on the edge of my seat till the very end. I love the daring pirate Nick!